The bibliography comprises collections and special issues devoted to agreement (section A), monograph-length studies of agreement , mainly studies of agreement in particular languages (section B), articles and book chapters devoted to agreement (section C). There is a good deal of material on agreement in the Slavonic languages which is given separately (section D).

This bibliography does not in general include works which may refer to agreement morphology in connection with language acquisition, language reconstruction or sign language.

Note: The author makes the claim that agreement is not a redundant feature-copying morphosyntactic phenomenon, but that it is a non-directional feature-merging phenomenon in which information distributed throughout the sentence is unified. A Discourse-Linking Theory of agreement is presented in which it is claimed that agreement can only be understood as a situated phenomenon associated with information present in discourse situations and the communication of information between speaker and hearer.

Note: This book is about what the lack of agreement indicates about the structure of language. Van Gelderen shows that instances where agreement is deficient are not due to psychological factors, but to grammatical ones. She gives the following reasons: (a) Lack of Spec-Head agreement. For example, in Dutch, you get a breakdown of agreement when the subject follows the verb as in veeg jij je voeten (‘wipe your feet’) versus jij veegt je voeten (‘you wipe your feet’); (b) C/overt movement and expletives. Movement may result in features being checked by the wrong element, an expletive. Van Gelderen defines an expletive as an element ‘deficient’ in features. For example, ‘het’ in Dutch is specified for person and gender, but unspecified for number; (c) Impact from grammaticalising processes. Certain elements start out as lexical items, specific in meaning, but acquire a much more general lexical meaning and/or a more grammatical function. That is, they lose phi-features and change categorial features. For example, is ‘with’ a preposition or a conjunction; (d) Structural configurations/ambiguous structures. Certain complex structures are intransparent and only part of the structure might decide agreement. For example, coordinate structures. The book focuses on the discussion of Verb Subject, Verb Object, and Verb-wh agreement structures.

Kathman, David Joseph. 1994. The Morphosyntax of Complex Verb Agreement. PhD dissertation. The University of Chicago. [Dissertation Abstracts International, A: The Humanities and Social Sciences, 1995, 55, 12, June, 3829-A. Order No DA 9513992.]

Note: This thesis concerns agreement with collective nouns in American, British and Australian English. It is based on material from newspaper corpora and spoken corpora. The findings suggest that dialectal, stylistic, diachronic, syntactic and semantic factors interact in the selection of singular and plural agreement. It was shown that there are differences between regional varieties, between speech and writing and between written and spoken genres. Syntactic influence on agreement was seen in the increased likelihood of plural agreement with increased distance between the noun (the controller) and its agreement-carrying words (the targets). This was observed both in the number of intervening words between a controller and its targets and in the difference between verbs, which are fairly close to their controllers, and pronouns. This trend was found in both speech and writing. These findings suggest that targets acquire more independence of the form of their controllers the further they are away. Semantic factors were also found to be important in British English. The noun itself plays a crucial role in the choice of agreement. A noun such as government very rarely takes singular verb agreement, whereas family takes either singular or plural agreement, and couple generally prefers the plural. A few verbs were found to require singular agreement with collective nouns (e.g. consist, be set up, increase), but other verb categories (e.g. think, say, work) were not found to influence agreement decisively. These and other features described indicate that a wide range of functional factors influence variation in agreement patterns. (author abstract)

Stefanescu, Ioana. 1997. The Syntax of Agreement in Romanian. PhD dissertation, City University of New York. Distributed as MIT Occasional Papers in Linguistics no. 14. Cambridge, MA: MIT Working Papers in Linguistics, MIT, Department of Linguistics.

Note: By making a distinction between Primary Agreement Controllers and Secondary Agreement Controllers, the author offers an account of agreement in constructions with non-regular controllers which is an extension of the ‘brother-in-law’ agreement of Relational Grammar. Secondary Agreement controllers (i.e. non-final terms) are allowed to control agreement on b if they head an arc which is overrun by an arc headed by a Primary Agreement Controller for b.

Note: The author offers an account of the phenomenon by which agreement facts require reference to non-final grammatical relations. Agreement controllers may thus contain inherent features and features which are ‘acquired’ from noun phrases which they have ‘overrun’ in the course of the phrasal derivation, i.e. when they have assumed a grammatical function previously held by another noun phrase. Language specific rules will decide whether inherent or acquired agreement features are referred to in a particular domain.

Note: In this paper the authors examine a set of apparently disparate constructions – possessor ascension, goal to 1 advancement, passive and 3-2 advancement - which exhibit the same verbal agreement prefix. The agreement prefixes are complex, providing information about final subjects and objects in a cumulative exponent. They argue that Southern Tiwa shares its basic clause structure with other languages, but that there is an additional agreement rule in the language which references the initial Absolutive relation. The apparently confusing agreement morphology can be explained by the interaction of this rule with the syntactic rules of advancement and ascension.

Allerton, David. 1992. Problems of Modern English grammar II: Disagreement about agreement: Findings. English Studies: A Journal of English Language and Literature 73(5). Swets & Zeitlinger. 458-468.

Note: The author tests a number of copular sentences in English to explore both the nature of subject predicate agreement and means of identifying the grammatical subject of such clauses. A number of conclusions are drawn regarding the relationship between epithet nouns and entity nouns and the preferences for agreement with each. It is illustrated that English seems to have a rigid subject-verb-predicative order in declarative sentences and that factors other than notions like heads and phrases have a role in determining agreement in English.

Topic: number agreement and Alzheimer’s diseaseFormal syntactic framework: -Language(s) cited: Standard American English

Note: Patients with Alzheimer’s disease (AD) have difficulty comprehending spoken language. This difficulty is apparent in their conversational interaction as well as in their performance in many laboratory tasks. The origins of this difficulty, however, are not well understood. This paper describes research that was undertaken to investigate the role of working memory in processing dependencies of different types and different lengths by examining the effect of intervening material on AD patients and healthy normal controls’ on-line processing of grammatical (i.e. subject-verb) and discourse (i.e. antecedent-anaphor) number agreement.

Note: The author presents arguments in favour of a Relational Grammar theory of agreement controllers which states that agreement is conditional on termhood, rather than a requirement that only subjects can trigger agreement or that there is an agreement hierarchy such that indirect object agreement implies direct object agreement.

Note: Contains (somewhat limited) discussion of the agreement between the ‘genitive case’ particles and the possessor in possessive constructions. (This is discussed in somewhat more detail in Morgan 1984.)

Note: The author provides a description of the agreement system of Acehnese. Agreement is found with verbal and adjectival predicates. It is marked by affixes, the controller of which is the subject or some kind of agent (either animate or inanimate).

Avgustinova, Tania and Hans Uszkoreit. Forthcoming. Towards a Typology of Agreement Phenomena. In William Griffin (ed.) "The Role of Agreement in Natural Language": Proceedings of the 2001 Texas Linguistic Society Conference. Austin, Texas. 2-4 March 2001.

Note: Agreement phenomena are instances of co-variation of linguistic forms which is typically realised as feature congruity, i.e. compatibility of values of identical grammatical categories of syntactically combined linguistic items. This paper focuses on the nature of the relations holding between the "agreeing" items. The main hypothesis is that systematic relations motivate shared patterns of variation cross-linguistically as well as across constructions resulting in a typology. A multidimensional taxonomy is proposed. The descriptive power of this taxonomy is demonstrated with examples from several Slavic languages.

Note: With respect to argument affixes in polysynthetic languages, authors (e.g. Jelinek 1984, M. Baker 1996, Simpson 1991) have generally taken one of two positions. Either these affixes should be regarded as agreement markers, or as pronominal arguments (‘anaphors’). That is, these affixes are either arguments of the verb, or they merely agree with the nominal arguments, which may be covert. In this paper, Baker argues that this view is not correct and that there is a three-way division in the morphosyntactic and referential behaviour of argument prefixes in Ngalakgan: bound anaphoric pronouns, agreement suffixes, and a third category which cannot be properly characterised either as an agreement marker nor as an anaphor, which he calls ‘pronominal generic affixes’. Referentially, these generic suffixes have affinities with incorporated generic nouns, and need not agree with a coreferential argument.

Note: The author proposes that, as a theory of agreement cannot be either purely semantic or purely syntactic, an approach in which agreement is understood as two separate but related phenomena is better motivated. He argues for two levels of agreement involving the introduction of a new feature infl in the head features of signs. Morphosyntactic agreement (e.g. subject-verb agreement in French) will be at the infl level, while agreement with predicative adjectives is semantic and will be at the index level in content. The two types of agreement relations are ‘Morphosyntactic Identification’ found in NP-internal configurations, where the infl value of the functor is structure-shared with the infl value of the argument, and ‘Index Identification’ found in subject-predicate agreement, which is the idenfication of the index which is the value of some role in the content of verbs. Other apparent agreement phenomena are reanalysed as instances of government.

Note: The author explores the problems associated with incorporating the predictions of the Agreement Hierarchy (Corbett 1979, 1983, 1988) into contemporary theories of agreement (Bresnan and Mchombo 1987 and Zwicky 1987). He concludes that a clear distinction between syntactic and semantic agreement cannot be accommodated in either approach and that in fact the distinction is spurious. The Agreement Hierarchy could be considered to be a description of differences among agreement targets with respect to feature identity versus feature conflict with controllers. He proposes a solution within Discourse Linking Theory (Barlow 1992) which has a property-based account of agreement. Both nouns and agreement morphemes introduce discourse referents. The hierarchy can be restated as the increasing likelihood of the introduction of new properties as you move to the right of the hierarchy.

Note: Agreement is widely considered to be the prime example of a relation based on linguistic form in which the morphosyntactic specification of one category, such as a subject noun phrase, is redundantly expressed on a separate category such as a verb. In this paper, I discuss the problems inherent in such morphosyntactic accounts of agreement and argue that the consideration of a range of attested agreement patterns leads naturally to an account in which agreement relations are seen as links between discourse information structures. Taking a discourse perspective avoids the descriptive problems associated with current syntactic approaches to agreement and leads to a revealing reconsideration of the nature of agreement relations. (author abstract)

Note: The author examines the two verbal conjugations in Hungarian, ‘subjective’ and ‘objective’ and presents arguments against proposed analyses of conjugation choice as relating to object agreement in terms of number/person, definiteness or specificity. Instead an account is offered in which objects nominals are divided into two types – those with a DP layer, and those without. Conjugation choice is dependent upon Case checking at an object agreement functional projection. [An earlier version of this paper was published as ‘Object Agreement Licensing in Hungarian’. Working Papers in the Theory of Grammar, Vol 4. No3. Research Institute for Linguistics, Hungarian Academy of Sciences. Budapest.]

Note: A study is described in which agreement data were collected and analysed to examine variability between ‘strict’ and ‘deflected’ (feature mismatch) agreement with human and non-human head nouns. Various factors including social class, age/sex and distance between controller and target were assessed for variability. In addition a pyscholinguistic experiment is described. The author concludes that agreement variability is used by speakers to signal their perception of the referents so as to classify it more narrowly.

Belnap, R. Kirk. 1999. A New Perspective on the History of Arabic Variation in Marking Agreement with Plural Heads. In G. Corbett (ed.) Folia Linguistica XXXIII/2. Special Issue on Agreement. 169-185.

Note: This paper examines variation in marking agreement in Arabic. In particular, the investigation focuses on the variation between plural and feminine singular agreement with plural head nouns. Tape-recorded naturalistic speech from sociolinguistic interviews conducted in Cairo constitute the data for the study of agreement in New Arabic. These results are compared to agreement patterns found in a corpus of Old Arabic texts. Some have suggested that the agreement variation found in New and Old Arabic varieties is random and meaningless. However, multivariate analysis of the Cairene and the Old Arabic patterns indicate both are systematic and that the two are similar in many respects. The agreement patterns in question appear to be a resource which speakers exploit to classify referents. It is generally agreed that the language contact situation resulting from the spread of Islam had a profound effect on the development of vernacular varieties of Arabic. Some have argued that the process of language shift to Arabic was rapid, resulting in deep-reaching changes in spoken varieties of Arabic. On the other hand, the formal variety of Arabic that came to be Classical Arabic is touted as having changed little. This study suggests that Classical Arabic, too, appears to be the result of some contact induced change and that the agreement system of Cairene is, in some ways, closer to that of early Old Arabic than is that of its standardized cousin, Modern Standard Arabic. From the standpoint of agreement, it would appear that varieties such as Cairene have changed less and that Classical Arabic changed more than one might suppose. These findings suggest that a re-examination of the history of Arabic is in order. (author abstract)

Note: Most Daghestanian languages show gender agreement between nouns and a broad set of targets, like verbs, adjectives, and local expressions. Dargi differs from other Daghestanian languages, among others, in that it shows person agreement in the verb as well. For that reason examples from the written standard are sometimes adduced in general linguistic literature. This article presents partly new data from the dialect of Akusha. An attempt will be made to find an adequate explanation for the presence of both ergative-absolutive and nominative-accusative patterns of agreement. (author abstract)

Bickel, Balthasar. 1995. In the vestibule of meaning: Transitivity inversion as a morphological phenomenon. Studies in Language 19. 73-127.

Bickel, Balthasar. 2000. On the syntax of agreement in Tibeto-Burman. Studies in Language 24. 583-609.

Branigan, Phil & MacKenzie, Marguerite. 2001. How much syntax can you fit into a word? Late insertion and verbal agreement in Innu-aimûn. In Suzanne Gessner Oh & Kayono Shiobara (eds.) Proceedings of WSCLA 5: UBC Working Papers in Linguistics 5.37-52.

Bresnan, Joan and Sam A. Mchombo. 1986. Grammatical and anaphoric agreement. In Papers from the Parasession on Pragmatics and Grammatical Theory at the Twenty-Second Annual Regional Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society. 278-297.

Note: The authors illustrate the observation that ‘person, number and gender are precisely the pronominal categories which universally show agreement in anaphoric relations’ and claim that the asymmetrical behaviour of subject and object agreement markers in Chichewa, a head-marking language, is indicative of their different status. Object markers are seen to behave as incorporated pronouns, bearing person, number, gender and pred features. They may be anaphorically linked to a floating topic NP in the sentence. They cannot occur with an overt object and if a free pronoun is present it must be for reasons of contrastive focus or to introduce a new topic. Subject markers, on the other hand, have a dual function. They may behave as incorporated pronouns, however they may also be simply grammatical agreement markers. In the latter case, they lack the pred feature in their f-structure. The features are otherwise identical.

Note: The authors argue that Chamorro and Palauan illustrate the logical extension of the claim by Keenan (1974) that functions may agree with their arguments in that they exhibit WH-agreement. The verb of a relative clause or a constituent question may agree in grammatical function with the gap controlled by the head NP or the displaced interrogative phrase. In these languages the morphology which normally distinguishes realis/irrealis mood is co-opted to signal agreement with the grammatical function of a gap.

Note: The author argues that there are two possibilities for case assignment to predicate nominals in copular constructions: case can be assigned by government (by the copula) which manifests itself as a difference between the case of the subject and that of the predicate nominal; case can also be assigned by agreement, where the case of the nominal predicate co-varies with that of the subject. Such an analysis would have to include case as a possible agreement feature.

Contini-Morava, Ellen. 1996. Things in a Noun-Class Language. Semantic Functions of Agreement in Swahili. In E. Andrews and Y. Tobin (eds.) Toward a Calculus of Meaning. Studies in Markedness, Distinctive Features and Deixis. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins. 251-290.

Corbett, Greville G. 1999. The place of agreement features in a specification of possible agreement systems. In G. Corbett (ed.) Folia Linguistica XXXIII/2. Special Issue on Agreement. 211-223.

Note: Agreement features introduce greater complexity into agreement systems than is generally recognized. They may determine the agreement domain (Dargi) and certain combinations of feature values can rule out particular sentence types (Tsakhur). Feature interactions show three levels of complexity: just the target may be involved (German), or a computation of controller feature values may be required (Slovene), or computation may involve a covert feature (Miya). (author abstract)

Corbett, Greville G. forthcoming a. Agreement: Terms and boundaries. In William Griffin (ed.) "The Role of Agreement in Natural Language": Proceedings of the 2001 Texas Linguistic Society Conference. Austin, Texas. 2-4 March 2001.

Note: This article discusses cases of subject-predicate agreement of postverbal subjects of unaccusative verbs with the verb in colloquial European Portuguese. Subjects of unaccusatives in European Portuguese are different from subjects of transitives and intransitives in two respects. They are the only allowed postverbal subjects in sentence-focus contexts (i.e. contexts in which all elements of a sentence convey new information), and leaving aside coordinated subjects, they are the only postverbal subjects that allow a not fully agreeing verb, that is, in colloquial speech, it is possible for plural subjects of unaccusative verbs in postverbal position to trigger 3rd person singular verb agreement. In this paper, Costa proposes an analysis of the behavior of subjects of unaccusative verbs in terms of Case. It is proposed that in colloquial European Portuguese, the argument of unaccusatives is not obligatorily assigned nominative case. This proposal is formalised.

Note: The author examines the problem of characterising the behaviour of direct objects with respect to agreement and case-marking. In the light of contradictory views as to the marked/unmarked status of definite/animate direct objects, the author proposes an account based on the notion of relative markedness. Agreement, which serves to cross-reference salient arguments, will always align itself with high animacy, high definiteness and core grammatical relations. Case marking typically denotes non-obvious grammatical relations. Thus the presence of agreement with a direct object implies that the entity is less marked, while case marking is associated with the lower end of the case hierarchy, so the presence of case marking on a direct object implies that the entity is more marked. The natural correlation of direct objects is with low animacy, low definiteness and highly affected objects.

Note: This paper is concerned with agreement patterns exhibited by pronouns in five varieties of Fula, a West Atlantic language of Niger Congo. It focusses in particular on un unusual type of agreement which is exhibited by some pronouns in Fula, i.e. agreement in pronominality. Like pronouns in general, the class of pronouns which refers to the 3rd person singular human class, agrees in number, person, and noun class with the elements they cospecify with. However, in Fula, these pronouns can only cospecify with another pronoun of that class; they cannot cospecify with a full NP in the same clause. Thus, if two such pronouns occur within the same clause, they can be coreferent or they can pick up their reference external to the clause as normal pronominals.

Dalmi, Gréte. 1998. On Object Agreement in Hungarian. Working Papers in the Theory of Grammar, Vol 5. No 2. Research Institute for Linguistics, Hungarian Academy of Sciences. Budapest.

Note: The author examines ‘subjective’ vs. ‘objective’ choice in verbal conjunctions and offers an alternative account to that proposed by Bartos (1996) [See Bartos (1997) in this bibliography]. The proposal is that the choice of agreement conjugation is motivated by differences in movement distance of the verbal head. Definite Object Agreement involves Short Head Movement, while Indefinite Object Agreement involves Long Head Movement.

Note: The author presents the results of a study into the acquisition of agreement in 4 children aged 2- 4½. It appeared that the children used nominal-modifier agreement before the systematic marking of nouns, but did not have most of the anticipated problems of acquisition, such as overgeneralization. The author speculates that children appeared to focus not simply on the nouns themselves but on the entire nominal or verbal phrase with its agreement information so that in Sosotho nouns are learned in conjunction with their gender class features, not in isolation. This is helped by the phonological transparency of class features within phrases.

Note: This paper discusses the interrelation between syntactic analysis of agreement and semantic processing by recording eye-movement and event-related potentials (ERPs). They test the hypothesis that if the processing of agreement is sensitive to semantic factors, then the interference effect induced by the violation of agreement should be greater for sentences in which the sentential subject is animate than for thoses sentences in which it is inanimate. The results of the experiments support this.

Dikken, Marcel den. 1999. On the structural representation of possession and agreement: the case of (anti-)agreement in Hungarian possessed nominal phrases. In István Kenesei (ed.) Crossing Boundaries: Advances in the Theory of Central and Eastern European Languages (=Amsterdam Studies in the Theory and History of Linguistic Science, Series IV, Current Issues in Linguistic Theory volume 182), Amsterdam: John Benjamins. 137-178.

Note: This squib discusses cases where agreement is suspended in colloquial English. For example, plural nouns in English must select the copula form are (‘re) in preference to is. However, in a where-sentence the reduced copula ’s can also be used as an alternative to ’re/are because ’re/are would be phonologically disharmonious with the preceding question word where. An analogous case concerns the use of are instead of am before n’t in sentences like Aren’t I silly.

Note: The author explores the null subject phenomena in the languages cited above. In Irish person and number inflection is incompatible with a lexical subject, in Welsh such inflection is incompatible with non-pronominal NPs, while in Chamorro it is incompatible with overt pronouns. Hebrew patterns like Chamorro. The author presents data in support of the claim that the null subject in Hebrew obtains only when the pronoun is in a ‘clitic configuration’, a particular configuration where the features of the complement are all contained in the features of the head. In a clitic configuration, Case is assigned to the clitic on the head and thus the head’s features are phonetically realised, not the complement’s features. Thus a phonetically overt pronoun complement would violate the Case Filter. In Celtic languages, on the other hand, the complementarity of inflection and overt subjects is due to their having incorporated subject pronouns. They are not null-subject languages.

Dowty, David and Pauline Jacobson. 1988. Agreement as a Semantic Phenomenon. In Joyce Powers and Kenneth de Jong (eds.) Proceedings of the Fifth Eastern States Conference on Linguistics. Ohio State University. 95-108.

Note: In this paper, Nicholas Evans argues that accounts of polysynthetic structure which simply see polysynthetic languages as verbs whose arguments are directly represented on the verb are inaccurate, and will be driven to forced and unnatural accounts for a whole range of construction types in which object affixes do not correspond to free personal pronouns. With examples from Bininj Gun-wok, he illustrates that argument prefixes can be used to represent objects in a range of circumstances where free personal pronouns would be inappropriate, such as generic objects, indefinite and certain non-referential objects

Note: The author discusses three hypotheses of agreement systems arising from approaches to the nature of the verbal affix in pro drop languages: the agreement hypothesis, the incorporation hypothesis and the non-pronominal theory. He rejects the GB characterisation of pro drop as involving strict feature matching between AGR and pro. Affixes in Arabic can be pronominal or nonpronominal and so some have two lexical entries, depending upon whether they occur with non-pronominal NPs or with pronouns. He distinguishes 3 types of agreement which are defined in terms of their domains at f-structure: Type I "internal" agreement, where the agreement domain is the f-structure containing a predicate and its subcategorised functions; Type II agreement, where the f-structure is a larger domain and agreement with modifiers and adjuncts is possible; and Type III "external agreement" in which the controller is external to the f-structure of the target. The author then illustrates the different binding relations associated with each type.

Friedman, Victor A. 1996. Gender, Class, and Age in the Daghestanian Highlands: Towards a Unified Account of the Morphology of Agreement in Lak. In Howard I. Aronson (ed.) NSL.8: Linguistic Studies in the Non-Slavic Languages of the Commonwealth of Independent States and the Baltic Republics. Chicago: Chicago Linguistic Society. 187-199.

Note: The term long distance agreement is used here for a construction in which the complement-taking verb agrees with an argument of its complement clause. Long distance agreement in gender occurs with certain complement-taking verbs in Godoberi, a Nakh-Daghestanian language. This kind of agreement is quite unusual cross-linguistically, and unexpected also from the point of view of current theories of agreement. While Daghestanian agreement syntax is unusual in several other respects as well, I show in this paper that long-distance agreement in Godoberi is not as "exotic" as it appears at first sight. The complement-taking verbs with which it occurs are those that commonly occur in clause-union constructions in other languages, and a similar analysis is proposed for Godoberi here. In this perspective, long distance agreement can be taken as one symptom of incipient grammaticalization of the complement-taking verbs. I cite parallels from other languages and end with a brief general discussion of the role of grammaticalization in the diachronic spread of agreement to new targets. (author abstract)

Note: The paper describes a survey of subject-verb agreement in18 ancestral islanders of Ocracoke. It describes the superstratum and substratum dialects – 18th century British English and 18th century Scots-Irish English respectively. The use of nonstandard 3rd singular concord with plural subjects is attributed to a two major factors: coordinated NP subjects and proximity to subject, while inflectional –s was rarely found with plural pronouns. This behaviour is attributed to dialect contact in 17th and 18th centuries and a persistence of the substrate dialect in modern speakers.

Note: Keach investigates the functions of subject and object marking in Swahili drawing on work by Bresnan and Mchombo (1987) on Chichewa. Keach concludes that Swahili and Chichewa’s SM (subject marker) have identical functions, that of PI (Incorporated Pronoun) and agreement. However, the languages depart with respect to the behavior of their OMs (object marker), which is far more complicated in Swahili. Swahili allocates the PI and agreement function to animate objects and reserves for inanimate objects the unambiguous PI function. The OM is obligatory for animate objects and optional for inanimates. In the case of inanimates the OM permits a definite or specific interpretation of the inanimate NP.

Keenan, Edward L. 1978. On Surface Form and Logical Form. In Braj B. Kachru (ed.) Linguistics in the Seventies: Directions and Prospects. Forum Lextures Presented at the 1978 Linguistic Institute of the Linguistic Society of America. (Special issue of Studies in the Linguistic Sciences Vol 8. No 2. Fall 1978. Department of Linguistics. University of Illinois. 163-203.

Note: The author presents a theory of agreement which updates that offered in Lapointe (1980, 1981). Using a modified version of the Barwise and Cooper (1981) logic for generalised quantifiers, the author explores the mechanisms by which agreeing elements are linked to each other in syntactic structures.

Lawler, John M. 1975. On coming to terms in Achenese: The function of verbal disagreement. In Robin E. Grossman, L. James San, Timothy J. Vance. CLS 1975. Papers from the Parasession on Functionalism. 398-408.

Note: The author examines the role of agreement in language. His basic thesis is that agreement is referential in nature. Its primary function is to identify or reidentify referents by giving information about the grammatical properties of its referent. The author distinguishes between two different types of agreement - ‘internal agreement’ and ‘external agreement.’ Internal agreement is adnominal agreement (including determiners, adjectives, numerals, possessive pronouns) and may involve the category of case but never of person. It expresses ‘coreference’ of the agreeing word with other words belonging to the same NP. External agreement (e.g. argument-verb agreement and possessor-possessum agreement) involves the category of person, but not of case and expresses ‘reference’ to an NP which specifies the meaning of the agreeing word.

Note: Specialist study within the framework of Gallmann 1990 on genitive case marked NPs, including some discussion of (non)agreement of modifiers and nouns in apposition/juxtaposition. (See also Schachtl 1989).

Lorenzo, Guillermo. 1997. On the Exceptional Placement of AgrO Morphology in Machiguenga: A Short Note on Baker's Polysynthesis Parameter. Linguistics. 35. 5(351). 929-938.

Note: Inflected genitives (i.e. NP's with suffix copying) found in Old Georgian and in some languages of Australia are compared with case attraction (i.e. agreement of a nominal modifier with its head noun, Classical Armenian) and genitival adjectives (Luwian). These types of NP imply non-prototypical distribution of inflectional and derivational features among morphemes. The occurrence of such constructions is further shown to be related to morphological types (fusional vs. agglutinative). It is argued that the NP's under discussion create difficulties in perception, brought about by non-prototypicality. (Author abstract)

Topic: The development of class and agreement marking in Kru. Formal syntactic framework: -Language(s) cited: Eastern and Western Kru languages

Note: The author attempts to reconstruct the noun class suffixes of the proto language. The synchronic variation between the agreement systems is examined and it is observed that while external (anaphoric) agreement is maintained, internal agreement is being lost in stages. The author observes that Godié (E.Kru) appears to be in the process of reinventing class markers through reanalysis of pronouns via definiteness markers which are suffixed to the noun.

Note: This squib discusses differences in agreement in expletive-argument structures with there and it. Expletive-NP chains headed by there regularly exhibit agreement between the verb and the postverbal argument, whereas expletive it never exhibits such agreement, even in conditions in which the semantic condition governing plural agreement with clauses is otherwise met, i.e. the conjoined propositions are contradictory or incompatible. Therefore, the author concludes that there is no expletive-argument link in constructions that contain an it pleonastic.

Note: The author treats pronominal clitics and inflectional affixes as members of the same category CL/AFF. She distinguishes between 3 functions of CL/AFF: (a) AGR forms (eg. personal endings in Italian); (b) pronominal forms (eg. pronominal clitics in Italian or French or personal endings in synthetic verb forms in Irish); (c) ambiguous between the two (eg. subject markers in Chichewa). She uses three diagnostic tests to determine which of the three functions the CL/AFF has in different languages: (i) cooccurrence with lexical NPs; (ii) obligatory vs. optional use; (iii) use of resumptive pronouns in long-distance relative clauses. Her conclusion is in line with Bresnan and Mchombo’s (1987) distinction between grammatical and anaphoric agreement with the addition to the typology of CL/AFFs behaving exclusively as subject AGR forms.

Note: The purpose of this paper is to present some crosslinguistically valid informal generalisations concerning grammatical agreement. Agreement in this paper is defined as: a grammatical constituent A is said to agree with a grammatical constituent B in properties C in language L if C is a set of meaning-related properties of A and there is no covariance relationship between C and some phonological properties of a constituent B1 across some subset of the sentences of language L, where constituent B1 is adjacent to constituent B and the only meaning-related non-categorial properties of constituent B1 are the properties C. In this definition, A and B are the agreeing constituents; constituent B1 is called the agreement marker; and the properties C are calles the agreement features. The paper focusses on the following questions: given the set of sentences in a language that has agreement, what are the meaning-related and form-related properties of those constituents that are in agreement relation with each other as opposed to those that are not, and what are the properties with respect to which they agree – that is to say, what are the agreement features? On the basis of this working definition and these two questions, a crosslinguistic survey of three types of agreement features – gender, number, and person – is presented followed by some crosslinguistic generalisations about agreeing constituents. Discussion centers on those instances only where the agrees-with constituent is a nominal or a noun phrase. The theory according to which agreement markers and anaphoric pronouns are grammatically derived by the same types of rules is informally shown to be predictive of some of the restrictions observed both in respect to agreement features and agreeing constituents.

Note: The author draws on the concept of agreement from Lehmann (1982) and considers how it interacts with Greenberg’s (1966) theory of markedness. Agreement can be seen to involve increased structure – a symptom of markedness. Markedness theory makes five predictions: (a) the controllers of agreement should be the more marked; (b) unmarked terms should preferentially agree over marked ones; (c) in competition the unmarked feature should prevail; (d) markers that represent a more marked category value should be more complex in form; (e) agreement should be more likely to occur in construction types that are marked. The author concludes that the predictions of markedness theory do hold for agreement, though she presents several examples which run counter to its predictions and calls for a more refined version of the theory.

Note: This squib is a follow-up on Dixon’s (1977) squib. Nathan points out that the phenomenon discussed by Dixon is far more wide-spread. ’s for are/’re can even be used in where-sentences when there is material between the wh-word and the verb, and it can also be used with other wh-words (e.g. how). Nathan gives the following analysis: "the contracted form of the verb be may be used in singular when the subject is in the plural, but only when in a wh-question, and only when the verb in question is the copula, not when it is an auxiliary".

Note: An oral corpus-based study of epicene pronominal constructions in English. These constructions involve pronouns coreferent with singular antecedents and referring to referents of indeterminate sex. According to the study, "they" is used in 60 percent of the tokens, "he" in 25 percent, and other forms minimally. Variation corresponds to three semantic factors: perceived sex stereotypes associated with the referent, notional number, and (surprisingly) degree of individuation. These findings corroborate accounts of the importance of agreement as a discourse-level phenomenon and of pronouns as elements whose informational content goes beyond mere denotation. (author abstract)

Note: The author examines the phenomenon of optional object agreement in Nothern Ostyak, a language which has subjective and objective conjugations in common with some other Uralic languages. She analyses the grammatical behaviour of two types of object, those that trigger agreement on the verb and those that do not. Comparing the properties of the two, and contrasting their behaviour with that found in Chichewa ‘anaphoric’ object agreement, according to Bresnan and Mchombo’s (1987) analysis, she concludes that the difference between the two objects in Ostyak is not due to differing semantics, argument status or grammatical relations, but rather is due to their information structure status. Information structure is an independent parallel level of representation. The object that does not trigger agreement bears the focus function, and systematically corresponds to the focus position in the syntax.

Note: This paper illustrates the constraints that control verbal agreement in Italian, focussing on the spoken Tuscan variety. Subjects are characterised by four properties in written standard Italian: (i) it governs verbal agreement (government = G); (ii) it is placed before the verb(position = P); (iii) it plays the pragmatic role of Topic (or Theme) (topic = T); (iv) it plays the semantic role of Agent (agent = A).These properties form a hierarchy controlling verbal agreement in written Standard Italian, viz. G > (P&T) > A with G being the dominant property. In Tuscan Italian, one extra property can be added to the list of properties that characterise the subject, the property F (for first). F combines the properties of morphological unmarkedness and syntactic indispensability and defines the subject as the obligatory unmarked argument implied by the verb or simply as the first argument. e.g. il mange chaque jour une dizaine de personnes dans ce restaurant. This property F is the dominant property controlling verbal agreement in Tuscan Italian. That is, the morpho-syntactic relation between Subject and (verbal) Predicate depends on the pragmatic pattern Topic-Comment (or Theme-Rheme) which governs verbal agreement.

Note: The author examines the phenomena of ‘case agreement’ in relative pronouns and inalienable possessive relations and argues that agreement may be a semantically meaningful relation, concluding that: the more two entities are semantically related, the higher is the possibility for the nouns that refer to them to show agreement; the more the information is pragmatically presupposed and known, the lower the frequency of occurrence of independent case-marking.(The examples are not given a morpheme-by-morpheme gloss.)

Note: Tsez, like most languages of the Nakh-Daghestanian language family to which it belongs, has agreement in terms of noun class. Tsez distinguishes four classes in the singular, but these are collapsed to two in the plural; agreement is shown on most vowel-initial verbs, on some vowel-initial adjectives and adverbs, on some vowel-initial particles, and on some pronouns and numerals. After presenting the basic system, we investigate a number of more complex instances. Under conjunction, Tsez sometimes uses a resolution rule, sometimes adjacency, with interesting differences between ‘and’- and ‘or’-conjunction. Personification in Tsez does not lead to change in noun class, even in cases of agreement with first or second person pronouns. Finally, Tsez allows the possibility of long distance agreement, whereby certain matrix verbs can agree with a noun phrase in a lower clause. We show that this phenomenon is intimately connected with the information structure of the clause, in particular that long distance agreement is required when the noun phrase in the lower clause is topic of that clause; indeed, under certain circumstances long distance agreement can serve distinctively to mark the topic status of a noun phrase in the lower clause. (author abstract)

Sankoff, Gillian. 1994. An historical and evolutionary approach to variation in the Tok Pisin verb phrase. In Papers from the 30th Regional Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society. Vol 2: The Parasession on Variation in Linguistic Theory. 293-320.

Saxon, Leslie. 1984. Control and Agreement in Dogrib. In Alvarez, Gloria, Belinda Brodie and Terry McCoy (eds.) ESCOL ’84: Proceedings of the First Eastern States Conference on Linguistics. Columbus, Ohio: Ohio State University. 128-139.

Note: This paper discusses two proposals that have been put forward as absolute universal principles governing grammatical agreement (GA), viz Keenan’s (1974) Functional (Dependency) Principle and the Agreement-as-Morphologized-Anaphor approach (Lapointe 1980).The paper considers the empirical testability of both approaches and shows that there exist potential counterexamples to both principles, which may invalidate them as absolute universals.

Note: The author investigates those constructions in which an initial pronoun in a coordination is morphologically plural without necesssarily having a plural referent. The initial pronoun is considered to be the head of the coordination, which is marked with the case and number of the dominating node. In addition, verb-coded coordinations are discussed, where the verb appears to agree with a missing NP in a coordination.

Note: The endpoint of the historical evolution of agreement marker from anaphoric person pronoun is the loss of referentiality on the part of the person marker and the obligatory presence of the nominal argument with which it agrees. Contrary to what might be supposed, such agreement, which I, inspired by Bresnan & Mchombo (1986, 1987), have termed grammatical, as opposed to anaphoric or ambiguous (grammatical and anaphoric) agreement, is cross-linguistically very rare. Moreover, among the attested instances of grammatical person agreement none involve object as compared to subject agreement. The present paper considers the distribution and formal realization of anaphoric, ambiguous and grammatical agreement markers in a sample of 272 languages and offers some tentative explanations for the existing asymmetry in regard to grammatical agreement. It is suggested that grammatical object agreement does not arise since ambiguous agreement, from which grammatical agreement evolves, is less common with objects than with subjects, and two of the potential sources of grammatical agreement, adherence to a verb-second constraint and phonological attrition are more likely to involve subjects rather than objects. (author abstract)

Note: This article examines the distribution and formal realization of Subject and Object agreement markers in different word order types (V3 (SOV,OSV), V2 (SVO, OVS), V1 (VOS,VSO), free, and split) relative to the Universal Suffixing Preference, the Head Ordering Principle, and the Diachronic Syntax Hypothesis on the basis of a sample of 237 languages. The Universal Suffixing Preference is based on the assumption that suffixing is easier to process than prefixing. The Head Ordering Principle takes inflectional affixes to be heads of their respective lexical categories and thus predicts that affixes should be suffixes in OV languages and prefixes in VO languages. The Diachronic Syntax Hypothesis defines a preference for morphemes to be located in the positions of the separate words which gave rise to them. The investigation shows that there is a statistically significant correlation between agreement and word order type, and that the coupling of the Diachronic Syntax Hypothesis with the Universal Suffixing Preference provides the best account for the data. Only 6% of the agreement markers in the sample do not fall out from the combination of these 2 hypotheses. By comparing the results stemming from the 237 language sample with those of other samples the paper seeks to draw the attention to how areal biases in samples may affect cross-linguistic generalisations.

Simon, Horst J. Forthcoming. From pragmatics to grammar: tracing the development of ‘respect’ in the history of the German pronouns of address. In Andreas H. Jucker & Irma Taavitsainen (eds.) Origin and Development of Address Terms in European Languages. Amsterdam: John Benjamins

Simpson, Andrew and Wu, Zoe. 2000. The development and licensing of agreement as a functional projection. In: Roger Billerey and Brook Danielle Lillehaugen (eds) WCCFL 19: Proceedings of the 19th West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics, Somerville: Cascadilla Press. 479-492.

Smith, John C. 1995. Perceptual factors and the disappearance of agreement between part participle and direct object in Romance. In John C. Smith & Martin Maiden (eds.) Linguistic Theory and the Romance Languages (Current Issues in Linguistic Theory 122). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. 161-180.

Note: This paper presents an analysis of verbal agreement in the ergative languages Chukchee and Koryak showing that certain aspects of the system pose a problem for current versions of Distributed Morphology.

Note: The author describes the Luiseño word as a compatible combination of Left-occurring String and Right Boundary Effect. The restricted number of possible Argument Structures in the language determine that there is never more than one obligatorily Possessive-marked element per argument structure.

Note: The author gives an account of agreement in case between a predicate nominal and its controller. It is suggested that the predicate carries the morphological features of its complements, both arguments and complements.

Wechsler, Stephen. 1999. Gender Resolution in Coordinate Structures. In C. Smith (ed.) Proceedings of the Workshop on the Structure of Spoken and Written Texts. Texas Linguistic Forum. University of Texas at Austin. 1-22.

Note: an extended version of this paper is to appear: Stephen Wechsler, to appear. Elsewhere in Gender Resolution. In Kristin Hanson and Sharon Inkelas (eds.) The Nature of the Word— Essays in Honor of Paul Kiparsky. MIT Press.

Wechsler, Stephen and Larisa Zlatić. 1999. Agreement in Discourse. Proceedings of the Conference on the Structure of Non-Narrative Texts, University if Texas, Austin. February 1998.

Wechsler, Stephen and Larisa Zlatić. 2001. A Theory of Agreement and its Application to Serbo-Croatian. Language 76.4. 799-832.

Note: Palauan exhibits a complex pattern of object agreement and preposition insertion, conditioned by aspect, specificity, number, and humanness. Objects must be either [+human] and/or [+specific, +singular] to trigger object agreement in a perfective clause or preposition insertion in an imperfective clause. Woolford gives an account of these facts based on a small number of economy and exclusion principles which are not unique to Palauan. Palauan manifests two exclusion principles and two economy principles. These are:(a) Exclusion principles: (a1) Specificity Exclusion Principle (Palauan variant), i.e. NPs inside the VP, governed by V cannot be [+specific,+singular]; (a2) Humanness Exclusion Principle, i.e. NPs inside the VP, governed by V cannot be [+human]; (b) Economy principles, i.e. Avoid Movement and Avoid Insertion. In order to get the appropriate output, these principles are ranked. In imperfective constructions the ranking is Exclusion principles >> Avoid Movement >> Avoid Insertion; in perfective constructions the ranking is Avoid Insertion >> Exclusion Principles >> Avoid Movement. In Palauan, the ranking in the imperfect is assumed to be the default ranking (only Avoid Insertion needs to be changed from lowest to highest in the perfect).

Note: The author uses evidence from the behaviour of quantifier phrases in Russian to argue that the head noun of a noun phrase does not control the case marking of its modifiers, but that case is assigned to the noun’s maximal projection where it percolates down to the available lexical and phrasal categories. Case assignment appears to follow a (possibly universal) Syntactic Case Hierarchy in Russian where lexical case takes precedence over all other types of case assignment.

Corbett, Greville G. 1986. Agreement: a partial specification, based on Slavonic data. Linguistics 24, no. 6. 995-1023. [Slightly revised version of a paper which appeared in Barlow and Ferguson (1988, 23-53).]

Note: The author highlights the difficulties encountered in attaining an adequate description of agreement by examining data from Slavonic languages. He examining in turn problems with identifying agreement controllers, targets and features. He then considers the factors which determine agreement in those cases where there exist different options. Such factors include animacy (of the controller) and precedence (in the syntax). As regards target factors, the author refers to the agreement hierarchy (Corbett 1983).

Krzysztof Czuba and Adam Przepiórkowski. 1995. Agreement and Case Assignment in Polish: An Attempt at a Unified Account. Research Report 783 of IPI PAN (Institute of Computer Science, Polish Academy of Sciences). Also available at http://dach.ipipan.waw.pl/~adamp/Papers/

Osenova, Petya. To Appear. On Subject-Verb Agreement in Bulgarian (An HPSG-based account). In Proceedings of the fourth Formal Description of Slavic Languages Conference, Potsdam, Germany, November 2001. Also available at: http://www.bultreebank.org/Publications.html

Patton, Helen. 1969. A Study of the Agreement of the Predicate with a Quantitative Subject in Contemporary Russian. PhD dissertation, University of Pennsylvania. Distributed by University Microfilms, Ann Arbor, 70-7839.

Przepiórkowski, Adam. 2000. Predicative Case Agreement with Quantifier Phrases in Polish. In Arika Okrent and John Boyle (eds.) The Proceedings from the Main Session of the Chicago Linguistic Society's Thirty-sixth Meeting. Chicago, IL: Chicago Linguistic Society. 343-354. Also available at http://dach.ipipan.waw.pl/~adamp/Papers/

Note: These two references provide two different accounts of case dative/instrumental marking on modifiers in Serbo-Croat NPs. Where the noun itself is in an ambiguous case form a disambiguating modifier, ‘agreeing’ in case, is required in order to make the phrase grammatical. (Similar phenomena in German are discussed in Gallmann 1990, Lindauer 1995, and Schachtl 1989, amongst other references.)